Little Altars Everywhere

Little Altars Everywhere

by Rebecca Wells
Little Altars Everywhere

Little Altars Everywhere

by Rebecca Wells

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Overview

“Brilliant. . . . A structural tour de force. . . . A classic Southern tale of dysfunctional and marginal madness. The author’s gift for giving life to so many voices leaves the reader profoundly moved.”— Seattle Weekly

The companion novel to Rebecca Wells’s celebrated #1 New York Times bestseller Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Who can resist the rich cadences of Sidda Walker and her flamboyant, secretive mother, Vivi? Here, the young Sidda—a precocious reader and an eloquent observer of the fault lines that divide her family—leads us into her mischievous adventures at Our Lady of Divine Compassion parochial school and beyond. A Catholic girl of pristine manners, devotion, and provocative ideas, Sidda is the very essence of childhood joy and sorrow.

Little Altars Everywhere is an insightful, piercing, and unflinching evocation of childhood, a loving tribute to the transformative power of faith, and a thoroughly fresh chronicle of a family that is as haunted as it is blessed.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780061835148
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 03/19/2024
Series: The Ya-Ya Series , #2
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 240
Sales rank: 209,798
Lexile: 850L (what's this?)
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

About The Author

Writer, actor, and playwright Rebecca Wells is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Ya-Yas in Bloom, Little Altars Everywhere, and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which was made into a feature film. A native of Louisiana, she now lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest.


Writer, actor, and playwright Rebecca Wells is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Ya-Yas in Bloom, Little Altars Everywhere, and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which was made into a feature film. A native of Louisiana, she now lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest.

Hometown:

An island near Seattle, Washington

Date of Birth:

1952

Place of Birth:

Alexandria, Louisiana

Education:

B.A., Louisiana State University; Graduate work, Louisiana State University and Naropa Institute

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Wilderness Training

{Siddalee, 1963}

One thing I really hate about Girl Scouts is those uniforms. Theybring out my worst features -- fat arms and short legs. Mama tries her best to give that drab green get-up some style, but I just get sent home with a note because the glitzy pieces of costume jewelry she pins on me are against regulations.

The only reason I joined Scouts in the first place was all because of merit badges. I wanted to earn more of those things than any other girl in Central Louisiana. I wanted my sash to be so heavy with badges that it would sag off my shoulder when I walked. There wouldn't be any doubt about how outstanding I was. When I walked past the mothers waiting in their station wagons outside the parish hall, I wanted them to shake their heads in amazement. I wanted them to mutter, I just don't know how in the world the child does it! That Siddalee Walker is such a superior Girl Scout.

I love going over and over the checklists for earning those badges in the Girl Scout Handbook. I have eight badges. More than M'lain Chauvin, who constantly tries to beat me in every single thing. I have got to keep my eye on that girl. She is one of my best friends, and we compete in everything from music lessons to telephone manners.

I was making real progress with my badges, and then our Girl Scout troop leader up and quit right after the Christmas holidays. She said she could no longer handle the stress of scouting. She didn't even tell usherself -- just sent a note to the Girl Scout bigwigs, and they cancelled our meetings until they could find someone to take us on.

And wouldn't you know it, out of the wild blue, Mama and Necie Ogden decide to take things over and lead our troop. I could not believe my ears. Mama and Necie have been best friends since age five. Along with Caro and Teensy, they make up the "Ya-Yas." The Ya-Yas drink bourbon and branch water and go shopping together. All day long every Thursday, they play bourrée, which is a kind of cutthroat Louisiana poker. When you get the right cards, you yell out "Bourrée!" real loud, slam your cards down on the table, then go fix another drink. The Ya-Yas had all their kids at just about the same time, but then Necie kept going and had some more. Their idol is Tallulah Bankhead, and they call everyone "Dahling" just like she did. Their favorite singer is Judy Garland or Barbra Streisand, depending on their moods. The Ya-Yas all love to sing. Also, the Ya-Yas were briefly arrested for something they did when they were in high school, but Mama won't tell me what it was because she says I'm too young to comprehend.

At least Necie goes out and gets herself a Girl Scout leader's outfit. Mama will not let anything remotely resembling a Scout-leader uniform touch her skin. She says, Those things are manufactured by Old Hag International. She says, If they insist on keeping those hideous uniforms, then they should change the name from "Girl Scouts" to "Neuter Scouts."

Mama drew up some sketches of new designs for Girl Scout uniforms that she said were far more flattering than the old ones. But none of the Scout bigwigs would listen to her. So instead, she shows up at every meeting wearing her famous orange stretch pants and those huge monster sweaters.

The first official act of Mama and Necie's reign is to completely scrap merit badges, because Mama says they make us look like military midgets.

Whenever I gripe about being cut off just as I was about to earn my Advanced Cooking badge, Mama says, Zip it, kiddo. Don't ever admit you know a thing about cooking or it'll be used against you in later life.

Now at our meetings, instead of working on our Hospitality, Music, and Sewing badges, they have us work on dramatic readings. They make us memorize James Whitcomb Riley and Carl Sandburg poems and then Mama coaches us on how to recite them. She calls out, Enunciate, dahling! Feel it! Feel it! Love those words out into the air!

All my popular girlfriends look at me like: Oh, we never knew you came from a nuthouse. I just lie and tell them Mama used to be a Broadway actress, when all she ever really did in New York was model hats for a year until she got lonely enough to come home and marry Daddy.

Our annual Scout camp-out always comes up just after Easter. I just dread it. I'm in the middle of reading a truly inspiring book called Judy's Journey. It's all about this girl who's exactly my age, and she and, her whole family are migrant workers. They have to travel from place to place, living hand-to-mouth. Judy works in the fields and never complains, and she is brave, and a hard worker, and very popular with all the other migrant kids. Her father plays the harmonica, and her mother is so kind and quiet. I fantasize around fifty times a day about being her instead of me. I would just kill to stay in my room and finish that book instead of going on a stupid camp-out, but you've got to do these things whether you want to or not. Otherwise any chance you have at popularity can go straight down the drain and you will never get it back.

You have to start early if you plan to be popular. Mama was extremely popular when she was growing up. She was elected Most Well-Liked, she was head cheerleader, captain of the girls' tennis team...

Little Altars Everywhere. Copyright © by Rebecca Wells. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

OOH! MY SOUL Siddalee, 1991.......... xi

PART ONE.......... 3
WILDERNESS TRAINING Siddalee, 1963.......... 3
CHOREOGRAPHY Siddalee, 1961.......... 15
WANDERING EYE Big Shep, 1962.......... 27
SKINNY-DIPPING Baylor, 1963.......... 39
BOOKWORMS Viviane, 1964.......... 51
CRUELTY TO ANIMALS Little Shep, 1964.......... 67
BEATITUDES Siddalee, 1963.......... 79
THE ELF AND THE FAIRY Siddalee, 1963.......... 91
THE PRINCESS OF GIMMEE Lulu, 1967.......... 99
HAIR OF THE DOG Siddalee, 1965.......... 113

PART TWO.......... 131
WILLETTA'S WITNESS Willetta, 1990.......... 131
SNUGGLING Little Shep, 1990.......... 145
CATFISH DREAMS Baylor, 1990.......... 153
E-Z BOY WAR Big Shep, 1991.......... 169
PLAYBOY'S SCRAPBOOK Chaney, 1991.......... 185
LOOKING FOR MY MULES Viviane, 1991.......... 195
THE FIRST IMPERFECT DIVINE COMPASSION BAPTISM.......... 209
VIDEO Siddalee, 1991

What People are Saying About This

W P. Kinsella

Voice and energy are two prerequisites for successful storytelling. Little Altars Everywhere displays very strong voices, and the energy fairly crackles off the page. Rebecca Wells is a writer to watch.

Andrew Ward

Some writers have all the luck. Not only did Rebecca Wells get to be Catholic, she also got to come from Louisiana. This means that half of her is crazy. Out of this chemistry she has written a brilliant, pungent, and hilarious novel about the Walker clan of Thorton, Louisiana....I'd like you to meet Miss Siddalee Walker, a force of nature and a tool of fate, and one of the sharpest-eyed little chatterboxes since Huckleberry Finn. Little Altars everywhere teems with the wonderful characters....But it's Wells' tireless and ruthless evocation of childhood combined with an unfailingly shrewd comic ear that makes "Little Alters Everywhere" such a thoroughly joyful and welcomed noise.

Pat Conroy

What an exciting new voice, and what a splendid first novel. Just wonderful!

Reading Group Guide

Plot Summary
I feel a hairline fracture of pain in my heart. And I feel it: the sweet pure longing of each of us, still intact. My family stands in a circle around me. All the innocence, the old woundings. It grows so quiet. I feel my godchild's breathing against my chest, but it is also the breathing of parched babies in drought-stricken lands. I feel each member of my family's breath dropping in and out, until it seems like we are all part of one giant bellows. And all the suffering spirals down into one shaft of sunlight which shines though one stained glass window in Thornton, Louisiana. This is what I come home to. I do not have to crawl across the desert on my knees. I do not have to swim through turbulent oceans to stop the drownings. All I have to do is watch and pray, and love them. Not save them, not hurt them, just love them.

Little Altars Everywhere, the first novel by Rebecca Wells, is the bittersweet story of the Walker clan of Thornton, Louisiana. Vivi Abbot Walker, the mother, is the eye of the hurricane. Her husband, Shep, is a cotton planter, and the two of them have four children: Siddalee, Little Shep, Baylor, and Lulu, who is named for Tallulah Bankhead, one of her mother's patron saints.

Each member of this funny, charming, and wounded family describes the view from his or her perch on the family tree. The book opens in 1963 with the recollections of Siddalee as a young girl, and continues with entries from her siblings, parents, and the black "help" who cannot save the Walker's from their darkness.

Twenty-seven years later, Wells returns to the Walkers, and this time the stories are startlingly different. The previous stories weren'tnecessarily lies, but they weren't the whole truth. It becomes clear that ultimately, there is no one truth within a family; there are only each character's tiny pin-light of truth. Little Altars Everywhere is finally about the tiny murders that occur within a loving but lost Catholic Louisiana family. It offers no miracles of redemption; instead it suggests the power of an open heart to offer protection to the innocent.


1. Wells uses multiple narrators to unfold the story in Little Altars Everywhere. What advantages are gained by this? Does this multiple perspective mean that we sense the story from a broader perspective from that of any one character? And what, if any value, is that broader perspective when evaluating the moral behavior of a character? Does the use of multiple narrators point to a truth that is too big, too uncertain, and too complex for any one character or person to put all together into a cogent vision? Do multiple narrators soften our judgments about a character?

2. What attitude does the novel take toward institutional religion (i.e., denominations), spirituality (a belief in and need for God and meaning), and human suffering. Catholicism is a strong presence in the novel. How does Catholicism both bless and damage the Walker family?

3. Vivi imparts a complex legacy to her children. What are the ingredients of this legacy? Shame? Suffering? A sense of wonder? A capacity for rapture?

4. Wells has said that "humor is the healing art." Discuss this in light of this novel.

5. Wells opens the novel with references to Little Richard in the "Prologue" and to Aaron Neville in the concluding chapter? What significance might this have? What role does racism play in the story of the Walkers? How does the value system of Chaney and Willetta differ from that of Vivi and Shep?

6. At the end of the novel, Sidda has a moment of insight into both her life and the lives of her family when she suddenly realizes that, "All their longing was pure." What does Sidda mean by this expression?

7. How can the acceptance of suffering help transform that suffering into love?

About the Author: Rebecca Wells, a Louisiana native, is an author, actor and playwright. Her works for the stage include Splittin' Hairs and Gloria Duplex, for which she created the lead roles. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Western States Book Award for her first novel, Little Altars Everywhere. She tours a one-woman show based on Little Altars Everywhere and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Wells lives on an island near Seattle, Washington.

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